Descartes taken seriously means....

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Peter Kropotkin
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Joined: Wed Jun 22, 2022 5:11 am

Descartes taken seriously means....

Post by Peter Kropotkin »

If we take Descartes seriously, that mean we have a much
different understanding of the world...

What did Descartes bring to the table? His "I think therefore I am".
What does that actually mean? "I think therefore I am" is
a statement about consciousness.. I am conscious and that is all
that statement means... you cannot get answers about epistemology,
or ethics/morality, logic, aesthetics, political philosophy or metaphysics
from "I think therefore I am''... all that statement shows us is we are
conscious beings...and nothing else can be derived from that...

read the ancient Greeks and what are their questions? Not epistemology,
the question of knowledge, how do we know what we know and what
are the scope and limits of our knowledge.. the ancients did not address
that question...and the Greeks did not address the question of consciousness..
consciousness was taken for granted...

The questions we face today come from modern day concerns...
From Descartes to Kant, philosophy was about epistemology..
but who now engages in that philosophical problem today?

which is a long way to say that philosophical problems are found
within the society/culture/ state of the time... our philosophical
problems of modernism are found within the problems that we face
together right now... and our current philosophical problems are
unique to us.... the Medieval period could not have possibly foreseen
our current modern philosophical problems.. they had their own problems
based upon their needs, their own specific time-based problems...
for the Middle age focused on questions specific to what their
problems were.... Metaphysical problems were their time specific
problems.. and they also focused on questions brought about by their
own time and place...a big Medieval question was about universals..
and who today spends much time on this question of the difference
between universals and individual things? Not many...

Philosophical problems are specific to the time and place of that
culture, environment, society, state...

so given all this, what is the real problem of modern times?

Given a No-god world, the questions we face are ethical/moral problems...
what does it mean to be ethical/moral in our modern no-god world?
That was the primary question of Nietzsche and every major philosopher
for the 60 years thereafter... A question we still have no answer for...
what does it mean to be moral/ethical in our modern technical,
scientific, no-god world?

I think we dropped this question of ethics/morality because we found out
that there is no good answer to this problem....

what is being ethical after the Holocaust, the two World Wars,
Vietnam, the atomic bomb, the IQ45 years of lies and unlawful actions with no
consequences....

(the right defense of all the illegal and immoral actions of IQ45 come down
to "whataboutism" IQ45 lied, but what about Obama or Clinton or Carter?
the right-wing defense is to admit the crimes but so what, if the other guy did it?
The ''whataboutism'' of the right wing says no crimes are every done if, if
someone has done it before them, so by the GOP standard, that robbing
a bank is ok because it was done before... that is their defense of the crimes
and lies of IQ45)

If lies and crimes are not to be punished because they were done before,
that means that no crime ever committed should be punished.. this theory,
this very flawed theory removes any context to any crime committed..
in other words, what happens to ethics/morality if we cannot punish
a crime because it was done before? The "whataboutism" of the right means
that we may as well destroy every single prison because under the right wing
theory, crime no longer exists.. because it was all done before...and a crime
done before absolves any action/actors from committing a crime today...

Because of the conservative "whataboutism" basically make all crime,
legal, what is justice or ethics/morality be about if all crime is
unpunishable?

Descartes taken seriously leads us to wondering if we have
any values or beliefs we can take seriously?
Because how do we justify any value or belief is all we can
take away from Descartes is our understanding that we
are conscious and nothing more...

Kropotkin
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